Leslie Brunetta

Happy Darwin Day!

If you google "darwin day" on blogs, you'll find a variety of science and other writers' personal appreciations of Darwin's genius--highly recommended. Here, we're of course partial to spiders. Darwin was more of a beetle man, but if you follow this link to last year's Darwin Day post, you can read of his noteworthy encounter with spider silk.

A neat little video from a couple of years ago that we somehow missed. Jonathan Coddington is one of the world's foremost arachnologists, and here he explains how photography gives today's araneologists an advantage over araneologists of the past. One quibble: Despite what Jonathan says, flying insects often do see webs. Why they still fly into them is a big research question we discuss in Chapter 10 of Spider Silk, "Now You See It, Now You Don't." Thanks to Bug Girl for bringing this video to our attention.